Produsage Communities

Berlin.
The second speaker in this (really productive) session on crowdsourcing at the Berlin Symposium is Malte Ziewitz, whose interest is in the application of crowd wisdom to regulatory problems. Crowdsourcing itself isn’t actually all that new – there have been questions about the wisdom or folly of crowds for a very long time already, and ‘the crowd’ has been positioned as a problem (the uninformed mob) as much as as a solution (drawing on folk knowledge and commonsense).

Current thinking on crowd wisdom comes variously from management science, computer science, and economics (painting crowdsourcing as an engineering challenge, focussing …

Berlin.
The next session at the Berlin Symposium is on crowdsourcing, involving two speakers (there’s also a lot of discussion, which I’m not blogging here.) We begin with Katarina Stanoevska-Slabeva, who begins by introducing the range of related concepts which describe the broad field of crowdsourcing. The Net is diminishing transactional costs for communication, collaboration and coordination; this facilitates collaboration amongst disparate stakeholders and provides more opportunities for individuals to participate. As a result, innovation has been democratised – indeed, users are becoming ever more important as innovators.

Internet-enabled innovation can be used as an umbrella term for these processes …

Berlin.
Now that the Berlin Symposium is properly underway (congratulations to all concerned!), I’ve made my way into the workshop session on social media governance. The featured speaker in this session is Niva Elkin-Koren, whose research is on governance structures within social media themselves. Social media participants in the first place constitute an unorganised crowd outside of traditional organisations – from open source development outside of companies to political action outside of traditional parties, as we have seen in various countries around the world over the past twelve months. This can lead to real political change, as well as to …

Seattle.
Well, the final day or AoIR 2011 is upon us, and I’m starting it in a panel on politics. We begin with Fa Martin-Niemi, whose interest is in knowledge-sharing in virtual spaces. Such spaces are filled with social networks, and people act differently as they participate in different social networks – sometimes deviantly to a lesser or greater extent. What are the implications for organisational knowledge spaces in this?

Extreme deviance, of course, is damaging to online social networks; there is also positive deviance, however, which can be beneficial (whistleblowing is one example – such deviance is honourable and …

Seattle.
OK, sadly I missed part of the Wisconsin protests AoIR 2011 panel, but I’m here at least to cover Matt Gaydos’s presentation. The history of Wisconsin’s protest and activist movements is strong, and the recent grassroots movement against the virtual outlawing of unions is an important new step in this; Matt recounts the story of himself and his fellow students becoming outraged enough to be persuaded to act.

Some of the organising took place through community-organised Defend Wisconsin Websites and Twitter accounts; these were useful, but only to people who were involved right from the start – they didn’t …

Seattle.
The next session at AoIR 2011 is our own, fabulous panel on crisis communication. We begin with an overview paper by my CCI colleagues Jean Burgess and Kate Crawford, who introduce the idea of acute events. Kate begins by outlining the idea of media ecologies involving a wide range of different media platforms, and their specific performance during acute events (such as crises, but also a range of similar events).

Jean follows on by defining acute events as significant real-world events which are associated with intense bursts in media activity – from political elections to royal weddings, from celebrity …

Seattle.
The final speaker in this session at AoIR 2011 is Anita Blanchard, whose interest is in entitativity on Facebook: the feeling of the ‘groupiness’ of specific groups. Such entitativity emerges from the presence of clear group boundaries, internal homogeneity between members, social interaction in the group, a clear group structure, and shared common goals held by all members. Such entitativity is a necessary precursor to key group processes and outcomes, such as a common group identity.

So, what is the level of entitativity on Facebook? How groupy can it be? There are a range of obvious groupings …

Seattle.
Kathleen Kuehn is the next speaker at AoIR 2011; her paper is inspired by protest events against the apparently racist attitudes of the operators a local swimming pool which were conducted with the help of the local services consumer review site Yelp. Yelp provides a space for user-created reviews ; how is such consumer-reviewing perceived by users?

This work uses Alvin Toffler’s prosumption concept; consumer reviewing of local products and services can be described as a form of prosumption (and echoing the alternative explanation of ‘prosumption’, participating users may also be thought of as professional consumers). Ideas …

Seattle.
OK, I walked in a little late to the first AoIR 2011 presentation this morning, by Michele Willson, whose focus is on information filtering. There are different approaches to such filtering: at the user or at the service end, initiated by users or by the system, cognitive or social filtering, and based on knowledge about the user’s interests which may be acquired through a range of different mechanisms.

Different stakeholders in the process, and in developing these processes, will have a range of different agendas and interests – developers have specific algorithms they may wish to explore, funding bodies …

Seattle.
The final speaker in this session at AoIR 2011 is Amoshaun Toft, who is looking at three cases of multilevel communication networks: action against homelessness, a direct action tent city for homeless people, and the building of a new jail which would be likely to hold many homeless locked up for minor misdemeanours.

Politics is the struggle over meaning, and such meaning is relational and contingent. People contest meaning through political action by connecting discourses. Issues organise social action, in specific discursive fields, in particular organisational fields, or through issue industries focussed on given issue areas.

New media technologies …